prayer, what we allow god to do in us - 23rd week Tuesday 2017
But no, prayer is primarily putting
myself in the presence of God, to just simply expose myself to God, to just
simply immerse myself in God’s holy presence.
Prayer is not what we do but what we allow God to do in us.
I believe many of you are familiar
with the process called osmosis. I do
not know if you have something familiar, but in the Philippines we have a
delicacy called salted eggs which my mother use to make at home. How do you make the egg salty without breaking
it or punching a hole on it? Simply by
putting it in a salty environment, and in the case of salted egg, by burying it
in a mud that is thoroughly mixed and saturated with salt. The egg’s exposure to this very salty
environment eventually makes it also salty.
The process is called osmosis.
Something like this also happens in the
prayer of Jesus to the effect that his exposure to his Father’s presence makes
him also “like” the Father. He decides
as the Father would have decided, he chooses as the Father would have chosen,
he acts as the Father would have acted, he speaks as the Father would have
spoken.
This is also the invitation for us
every time we celebrate the mass. To
listen to God’s word so that little by little God’s word becomes part of our
logic, God’s word influences the way we think, the way we decide, and even the
choices we make in life. And above all
we receive Jesus in holy communion praying with St. Augustine that we too may
little by little "become what we eat," that as we ingest Jesus truly present in
the bread we will also come to think, and speak and act like him
And so this is prayer. It’s not what we do, but what we allow God to
do in us because we have put ourselves in his holy presence.
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